Serial entrepreneur and startup investor Jason Calacanis launched
a new app this morning, Inside.com. Its mission: to change
the way you find and read news on your smart phone.

At a glance, Inside.com is a lot like one of Calacanis' startup
investments, Circa. It's a mobile-first news reader that's full
of external links and story summaries. Readers can follow certain
topics and thumb left or up and down to find new
stories. Topics range from traditional, like
"Technology," to unique, like "Wonder Woman" or "WTF
Florida."

Calacanis has a team of 15 people and money left over from a
previous venture-backed startup, Mahalo, to run Inside.com.
Blackberry is also an investor. The small staff is producing
1,000 stories — or "updates" which are no longer than 300
characters — per day. The headlines are straight-forward to avoid
link-baiting.

Calacanis' team is also selective about which stories they
promote on the app. They strive to highlight articles that are
either fascinating or informative; Inside.com has a list of
publications which are blacklisted because they don't do enough
original reporting. Calacanis likens the product to
Whole Foods. When you go there, you know you're only going to get
the healthiest food. With Inside.com, he wants readers to feel
there's a high-quality selection of content to choose from as
well.

But the biggest difference between Inside.com and most of its
news-producing competition is its masthead.

"The mission of Inside is to
build the world's best news product," Calacanis told Business
Insider at his Culver City headquarters. "But we want to do that
without any journalists."

Calacanis wants Inside.com to
be the starting point for news consumption on mobile devices,
like Twitter is right now. He doesn't want users staying on his
app for very long. He wants them checking in multiple times per
day and clicking out to the newest stories in a matter of
seconds.

"We want to be the starting
point, not the destination," says Calacanis. "We don't do
any original journalism and we're never going to."

Calacanis has wanted to launch
Inside.com for a while. Earlier, he released a product to test
the idea, Launch Ticker. "It was
a minimum viable test, and more than 10% of users converted into
paying customers," says Calacanis. Earlier this month,
Calacanis brought on Gabriel Snyder, former editor of The Wire,
to lead Inside.com's editorial direction.

Registering the domain
Inside.com proved to be difficult. Over the course of ten years,
Calacanis tried to buy Inside.com four times from three different
owners. He finally succeeded in acquiring it and the Twitter
handle "Inside" from their last owner, The
Guardian.

Calacanis found previous
success as both an entrepreneur and investor. He made a
name for himself runningSilicon Alley
Reporter during the dot-com bubble in New York.
Then he started and sold Weblogs to AOL for ~$30 million. But the
company that will make him the most money is Uber.